Gabriel and the Swallows (The Volatile Duology #1) (24 page)

And I looked at her, my Volatile, my swallow-girl, my savior, my friend. I felt hope rise within me, and I opened my mouth to say what she, undoubtedly, had always wanted to hear. But I halted and the words would not come. She was dead. Volatile was dead.

“Never mind,” she said, “take your time.”

“Volatile…” I began, and her name was like an unsweetened lemon drop on my tongue.

But her eyes were fixed on the roof beams, as if she could detect a change of weather. “It’s time,” she whispered. “
Wake up
!”

And I found myself, bathed in sweat, in my rickety little bed on the farm, a new morning.

I began to sleep later and later each morning, neglecting my father who would wait for me, keeping the coffee warm over the stove, rereading articles in that day’s paper just to entertain himself. He would remark on the many times he tried to wake me, shaking me and calling my name, both gently and with some force, and I would not awake. Sometimes, he said, my body was like a stone, barely even breathing. Sometimes, my eyes were wide open, fixed on the ceiling. He would become flustered and worry about losing me so soon after my mother, but I would laugh him off. As I slept later and later, he would abandon the paper and the coffee, not able to neglect the winery a moment longer. I would wander out to him then, head fuzzy and with bleary eyes, and my father would shake his head sadly and point to the barn, where new bottles of
Dolce Fantasia
were waiting to be labeled. I was entrusted with nothing new. I merely resumed the tasks I did as a child, feeling under the hens’ warm bellies for new eggs.

I began to long for sleep, for the world where my father was not so old and sad, where I could rest in the arms of my mother like a baby, where the food and the music was better, and there lived a woman who loved me. I discovered I preferred the lack of townspeople in the new Orvieto, no reminders of the real world. I would too often catch idle gossip on my sunset strolls into town, which infuriated me. On the pretense of visiting Orlando, I would simply go into the nearest store and purchase bottles of whiskey, small enough to conceal inside my jacket. I needed them to aid me in falling asleep sooner, maximizing on my time in the other world.

Life seemed to go on in the real world, dull and as dreary as anything without Orlando, and a father that barely spoke to me. I began to see that Volatile was right, and I found myself unknowingly slipping more and more into her world. No one came to visit us on the farm, and when Tomasso died, my father buried it on our property and made it a little wooden headstone, as if it were a member of the family. He asked me to accompany him to the grave, to say a few words over a cup of grappa. But I laughed and waved him away, for how ridiculous it was to give a donkey a eulogy.

Time passed, and only two pieces of gossip succeeded to substantially rock me on my trips into town. It seemed that Mariko Marino was returning to Orvieto with the intent of introducing her father to a new suitor. The Orvietani were all atwitter at the news, for it seemed this beau was in a prominent position of power, as the nephew of the English ambassador. Apparently Signorina Marino, who nobody thought would amount to much being a mixed-race child, had met the esteemed man, who was by all accounts the son of his Excellency’s most favorite brother, in a lowly beer shop in one of Rome’s trashiest areas. And of all nights to meet, the night of that scandalous Roman tradition,
Donne Notte.

“You crafty son of a bitch,” I drawled to no one in particular after hearing this news. I took an extra large swallow of whiskey and held it up to the window, as if saluting my old friend. I might have even smiled a little. It didn’t hurt anymore.

The second piece of news hit me much harder. It seemed that Signora Gallo, irritated that her husband had not come to bed the night before, had marched all the way to the other wing of their enormous manor, and into his trophy room to tell him off. She found him there, slunk down in a revolving chair, a hole in his head and his brains splattered all over the opposite wall. A Winchester shotgun lay cold on the ground, and his dead eyes were fixed upon a gold-plated plaque bearing the stuffed head of an enormous bird.

A week after Gallo’s death, I was awakened by a ramming at the front door. I lay there, expecting my father to open it. When the hammering had gone on, at first hesitant and then abrasive and demanding, I pulled myself out of bed. Not bothering with a shirt and clad in dirty grey pajama pants, my long hair plastered to my face with sweat and a five-o’clock shadow spread over my jaw, I staggered to the front door. I was not pleased at being disturbed, as I had just been making love to Volatile, an occurrence in the white world that had become a religion to me. I adjusted what little clothing I was wearing out of a long-lived sense of modesty and almost swooned. I was incredibly hung over.

“What?” I demanded, throwing the door open, my eyes squinting in the sudden light.

“My, my,” said a slick, caramel voice. There was something familiar about it, something in the high tones it carried, like top notes of a famous perfume. “Aren’t you going to invite me in?” said the voice, and it swept past me and into the house.

I gaped at the stranger in the middle of the kitchen. She wore a tight black linen suit, with a pillbox hat adorned with ostrich feathers, a lace veil dipping artfully over one eye. Her bright hair was cut into a fashionable bob that ended just below her sweeping cheekbones, flushed to an apricot hue. “Don’t tell me you don’t recognize me,” she stated, hands on her hips. A Chanel purse with a gold chain-link strap swayed from her wrist.

I peered at her deftly, like she was script on a page too far away to read. And then it hit me. I threw back my head and began to laugh, not a happy laugh nor a sad laugh, but a laugh of pure irony.

She stared at me until I was done, until the last sound left my lips and I straightened to stand facing her, level to level. “Darlo Gallo,” I announced. “Get out of my house and go to hell.”

“W
hat colorful language!” chided Darlo Gallo with faux-horror. “Did you get my flowers?”

“Out,” I growled.

“Such hostility,” remarked Darlo cheerfully.

“What can you expect,” I muttered, putting my hands roughly on her shoulders and steering her out the door as one would an overflowing garbage pail, “after the way you treated me?”

Darlo stood on the doorstep, hands on her hips, eyeing me quizzically. “What on earth are you talking about?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I snapped. “How about ‘lady boy’ and ‘freak’? Tripping me in the halls and slapping me around? I recall on one such occasion, you even bit me.”

Darlo’s face quickly turned bright red, and I was satisfied to see her blush. But after a few moments, I realized it was not a chastised blush at all, and when her face grew scarlet from holding her composure, she burst out laughing. “Oh
that
!” she cried, “oh, Gabriel, you’re not still holding a grudge about silly childhood stuff, are you?” And with that, she patted me on the forearm, sailed past me, and made her way back inside the house.

“I certainly am!” I scolded. “You made my very existence a misery!”

“Children can be so cruel,” agreed Darlo amiably.

“You and your band of boys used to single me out every day.”

“What a long memory you have! Delightful!”

“Because of you, I had no friends!”

Darlo’s smile faded and she peered at me under elegantly tapered brows, quite seriously. “I do apologize for that,” she said, and with a start I realized she was sincere. “When we started school, I remember telling everyone to ignore you. That they would feel my wrath if they befriended you. I guess they took me seriously.”

“What kind of psychopath does something like that?” I demanded.

“You idiot!” exclaimed Darlo and began to laugh, revealing a dazzling row of blindingly white teeth. “I was in love with you!”

I was horrified. “
What
?”

“Yes, that’s right. I wanted you all to myself! I
simply
couldn’t abide anyone else messing about with Gabriel Laurentis!” She giggled at the memory, pulling one manicured hand up to her lips. “Oh, the tactics of the young! Amusing, isn’t it?”

“
What
?” is all I could repeat. I could hardly believe my ears.

“But I’m sure you’re far too much of a man now to let silly childhood games get in the way of common courtesy.”

“Is that why you’re here?” I demanded irritably, “What’s the idea, are you trying to sweep me off my feet or something?”

But Darlo Gallo threw her head back and roared with laughter, a very unladylike gesture, I thought. “Oh, darling, you’re priceless!” she said, holding up her left hand, where a set of wedding rings, including a diamond the size of a skimming stone, winked at me. “And despite my marital state,” she continued, perusing me from head to foot, “what a God-awful mess you turned out to be!”

“I’ll have you know,” I bawled, “that in Rome I had eighty-seven—“

“Yes, yes!” dismissed Darlo, waving her hand in front of my face. And then the idiot started blathering on about how thrilled she was that I recognized her immediately, the trouble the Orvietani had with that these days. How much she had changed, and how they remembered her as the face of a prominent Parisian milliner in stucco-pink print advertisements, rather than her father’s daughter. I gagged at the thought. I grimaced and wondered how far the company sales had plummeted since hiring that
thing
.

“Would you stop?” I moaned, “you are giving me a headache. I don’t know how to get this through your thick skull, but I am not interested in your—“

“Gabriel Laurentis!” came my father’s shocked voice from the back door. “Is that how you were taught to address young ladies? Your mother would be ashamed!” He walked past me glaring, taking in my lack of shirt and dirty pants, my general disheveled appearance, shaking his head with disbelief.

He peeled his cap of his head and bowed his head in apology. “Forgive my son, Signorina, he hasn’t been the same since…well, I never!” he exclaimed, peering at the intruder with great interest. “Is that you, Signorina Gallo?”

“Why, yes it is, Signore Laurentis. You haven’t changed a bit, not a day older, I do declare!”

“Let me look at you!” cried my father as I stared at him, my jaw hanging to the ground as Darlo took an animated twirl. “You’re a vision!” he stated. “I recognized you immediately from all those hat advertisements, Signorina Gallo!”

“It’s Signora Guiliani now,” chided Darlo gently.

“Oh dear, I had quite forgotten,” said my father. “You married that famous actor! A Florentine, no less!”

“Radio personality turned politician, but who’s really paying attention to all that dreary business?” laughed Darlo.

“Well, congratulations! And I was so sorry to hear about your father,” said Papa.

“Oh no, you weren’t,” laughed Darlo, slapping my father lightly on the shoulder, “nobody but me misses that old bully.”

“We have such few visitors these days, especially ones so young and beautiful,” stated my father. “Sit, sit, let me make you some coffee.”

“How delightful!” exclaimed Darlo.

“Gabriel, sit down with the young lady! And be polite.”

But I glared at him and in response, stomped out the front door, slamming it behind me.

“Oh, dear!” I heard Darlo chiming merrily through the open kitchen window, “we have upset him, haven’t we, Signore Laurentis?”

And they both laughed.

She found me late that afternoon, roaming moodily in the woods, head down and hands thrust deeply in my pockets. Her presence in Orvieto shook me inexplicably, and I desperately wanted not to care, the way I no longer cared about Mariko or Everard Fane, or anyone else I used to know. Volatile, my dream life, had taken over my consciousness and I lived for the night.

The first time Volatile and I made love in the white world was an experience unlike anything I had before. All of that hazed, messy fooling about, the simple mathematics of it all, how many times does X enter Y to achieve the desired result? did not exist with her. It was a science. A combustion of chemistry, of experimentation, of trial and error and gradual success. The anatomy of her body was a perplexing field of study, the way her spine curled upwards in the lower back, tapering from the tailbone into a majestic feathered fork that she could wrap around her hips like a belt. Her wings, built from the misshapen arcs of shoulder blades, soared in long, elegant lengths of human bone similar to the tibia and the femur. But despite these differences, she seemed so normal, so homosapien that I would involuntarily shudder when I recalled the words:
how do you know what I really look like?

She looks like this, I found myself whispering to myself in these moments, she looks exactly like this.

I was beginning to feel the reigns of reality and therefore sanity drift away from me peacefully, like a friend so dear a goodbye isn’t always necessary. I lost appetite for most foods, and hence was obliged to buckle my belt two notches backward. My father was beginning to hint at taking me to a doctor, and on top of his workload, he often cooked a sort of meaty stew he knew I once liked to tempt me to eat, a poor attempt of burned onions and an unbalanced medley of herbs. He always forgot the garlic. He always overused the salt.

He grew especially alarmed when I began confusing the two worlds. Upon chiding me for my late mornings and lack of help in the vineyard, I would gaze at him indolently and snap, “Why are you bothering me with this? Get the workmen to do it!”

“What workmen?” he would ask.

“You know, Costar, Bianchi, Lombardi, those guys. And keep an eye on that Polish fellow, Gustav is it? I have a feeling he is filching from our stores.”

“Polish fellow?” whispered my father. “Our stores?”

And then it would dawn on me, and I would literally shake the thoughts out of me, nodding my head from side to side severely. “Never mind,” I would say and grimace at him. “I must have been dreaming.”

And Papa would stare at me for a long time, like I was the ghost of my mother, head bobbing about uncontrollably on still shoulders.

“Your father told me you’d be here,” she said, “I parked the car just down the trail,” she explained, no doubt referring to the ivory convertible I saw earlier outside our house. “He knows you so well. I would have been completely lost.”

“I certainly doubt you had much reason to play in the woods as a child,” I said grumpily.

“You’re absolutely right,” she trilled, smiling at me. “I have no idea where I am! It’s wonderful, isn’t it, discovering things that were in front of your nose the whole time?”

“Why are you here, Darlo?”

“For my father’s funeral, silly.”

“I mean, what do you want with me?”

“I want to help you.”

“I don’t need help, and even if I did, you would be the last person I would call on.”

“Because of how I was as a child?”

“Perhaps.”

She sighed and threw her hands up in the air. “People change, you know.”

“So you’re about to try and convince me that you’re no longer the spoiled, selfish brat that gets everything she wants?”

And Darlo Gallo laughed. “Absolutely not!” she exclaimed. “I am completely spoiled, and still get everything I want. Although these days, I make sure those who give me what I want are most satisfactorily rewarded.”

I was beginning to grow impatient with her presence, the merry lilt of her voice disrupting my dark and somber thoughts.

“You ought to be kinder to your father, you know,” she said softly.

“Oh, you’ve had a nice long talk, I see.”

“I don’t think your father’s had anyone to talk to for a long time, the poor dear. We did have a rather fun time of it. We even drank some of that whiskey you hide under the bed! And he took me out to see the grave of…Tomasso was it? He said so many lovely things about Tomasso.”

“Tomasso was our donkey,” I stated drily, hoping to shock her with our bad taste and poverty.

“I always wanted a donkey,” she replied, not missing a beat. “He must have been wonderful.”

“I suppose,” I conceded grudgingly, and I felt a sudden sadness creep up on me, and realized for the first time that Tomasso was gone. My mother was gone. “And now your father’s gone too.”

“Yes,” said Darlo, her eyes on the ground. “I know what you are thinking. He was cruel to your family, but I doubt there was a family in town he was kind to. He even forbade my mother from speaking to her brother because he married a Chinese woman…”

“Japanese,” I corrected, out of instinct.

“I beg your pardon, Japanese, of course. But he was still my father, so generous to me, and I will miss him in some ways. He left me the estate, did you know that?” she said quietly. “I don’t know what to do with it. A winery in ruins.”

“I don’t want to talk about Alfio Gallo,” I said roughly.

Darlo gave me a long look as I hunched down in a squatting position, poking at the ground with a stick. “I suppose you have your reasons,” she said evenly.